SAN JOSE — Mountz Inc. might want to create a new ad campaign for one of its torque-tightening tools used by astronauts aboard the International Space Station:

“Used in Outer Space, Made in San Jose.”

It’s a classic hometown-kid-makes-good, rockets-to-fame story.

“For a lot of its materials, Lockheed needed inventive ways to keep things joined together, which is right up our alley,” said Brad Mountz, head of the 75-person company his dad started in 1965 which makes sophisticated tools and calibration devices in its shop on North Eleventh Street. “Our whole success germinated in Silicon Valley, so we feel very attached to being here and staying here.”

With a major public-private push underway to strengthen a regional manufacturing industry that’s been downsized over the past 25 years, it’s easy to forget there’s a whole lot of stuff getting made in San Jose, much of it just below the radar. Folks in the state’s third-largest city are busy crafting cheeses and catheters, hard drives and packing labels. They’re making satellite receivers and digital tags that can track a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label right to your liquor cabinet.

Despite upward pressure on wages and the high cost of living in the Bay Area, many veteran manufacturers have stayed put and even expanded while newbies have embraced the homemade label.

“I’m so proud to be making something that’s not just ‘made in America,’ but made in San Jose,” said Alice Lin, a 28-year-old entrepreneur who has created an entirely new line of skin-care products for people under the Wonderland Organics label.

As Mayor Sam Liccardo beats the drum for more manufacturing jobs, the co-founder of local brewery Gordon Biersch can boast that he’s been making things here for nearly two decades. And it’s not just the beer. Dan Gordon’s also making the water that goes into it.

“We truck in malted barley from the Midwest and Central Canada and bring in the hops from Germany, but the water comes from San Jose,” he said. “Then we strip it down and rebuild it with reverse osmosis and it comes out pure H2O. So I guess you could say the water is made right here in San Jose.”

Over the past 50 years, the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley has gone from the fruit-salad days of “Grown in San Jose” to a maker-based hub of innovation. For years, its fab plants were filled with workers cranking out the guts of the consumer technology we all wear like a second skin.

But thanks in large part to jobs being off-shored, the total number of manufacturing positions in the San Jose metro area, which includes most of Santa Clara County, dropped from 254,600 in 1990 to 159,100 last year. And while manufacturing accounted for more than a third of all jobs 25 years ago, that had dropped to 16 percent in 2013. More recently, however, the percentage of people working in manufacturing has edged closer to 20 percent, and more than 57,000 of those jobs are now located in San Jose.

“We’ve actually been surprised to see the large ecosystem of manufacturing that’s occurring here,” said John Lang, the city’s chief economist. “It’s mostly nameless and faceless because a lot of companies don’t market the fact that they’re doing manufacturing. But you see all these buildings and wonder what’s going on inside.”

Let’s start with 2039 Forest Avenue, in the shadow of O’Connor Hospital. Inside, Ray Rendon and his small team are making eyes. Fake eyes. Says Rendon, “we custom-fit artificial eyes and lenses for people disfigured from birth or an accident.”

Rendon has his own personal reasons for staying in San Jose, even though moving manufacturing jobs elsewhere can often save money. “It’s a territory I’ve developed,” he said. “I’m from San Jose; it’s my home, and it’s a good fit for me. I get a lot of satisfaction from helping people in San Jose and the Bay Area look normal again. Most people are very happy when they look normal.”

Making stuff in San Jose has not always been easy, which is why the city is promising to cut fees and speed up the permitting process for local manufacturers who want to retool or expand. Lang calls these challenges “pinch points,” and the mayor wants to reduce them. Unfortunately for Paul Burns, founder of Fireclay Tile, the city is about 25 years too late — he began to move his operation in 1990 to Aromas, near Watsonville, because those pinch points were just too painful.

“We wanted to expand, and in the late 1980s San Jose wasn’t friendly to manufacturing,” Burns said. “Things have changed in the past seven years, but there was a period where any kind of permit was hard to get. Once that bureaucratic attitude set in, it’s hard to change it.”

As Liccardo turns up the love, and the city offers manufacturers reduced fees on new buildings and tenant improvements along with an improved 60-day permitting process, Chad Mitchell says the timing could not better. The co-founder of Mica Creatives, a seven-employee firm that designs and builds custom furniture for startups, wants to expand somewhere in San Jose. Building — and buying — local is his mantra.

“Local materials are of much higher quality than what you’d buy overseas,” he said. “And by buying locally, that money supports the local economy and the community through tax revenues and wages for workers at the companies we buy from.”

Jack Roan of the Noble Amplifier Company keeps cranking out high-end amps from his garage, selling them to musicians backing up superstars like John Mayer and Taylor Swift. “What’s amazed me,” said Roan, “is that through the Internet, I can sell anything right from my home to anyone at anytime anywhere in the world.”

So from Treat Ice Cream to Eggo waffles to high-end bicycle parts from Phil Wood & Co. to that whiskey-bottle’s digital sensor from printed-electronics pioneer Thinfilm, the products keep flowing from every corner of San Jose.

“San Jose provides us customers who appreciate the value of having a supplier with a Silicon Valley presence, as opposed to someone based in Asia,” said Dan Smyth with Celestica, which manufactures electronics for a whole host of companies. “Our customers are willing to pay a bit more for that local feel and touch when they want to meet with us. Plus, they don’t have to travel very far.”

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.